New: George Orwell Studies 6.1

The explosion of interest in the life and writings of the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four in recent years is reflected in the latest, whopping issue of George Orwell Studies. With 184 pages, Volume 6 Number 1 is more like a bargain book!

Darcy Moore continues his investigations into the ‘hidden Orwell’ with a grounding-breaking study of the networks of left-wing intellectuals, journalists and political activists he joined in Paris during the late 1920s. Many studies tend to focus on a small part of Orwell’s output – say a particular friendship, quarrel, essay, novel or piece of journalism. G. Alexander Denning takes this minimalist approach to its limit devoting a 6,000-word essay to just the first sentence of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s celebrated dystopian masterpiece he completed just before his death: ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’

Gleb Zilberstein, Svetlana Zilberstein and Pier Giorgio Righetti examine the documents of the counter-intelligence service of the International Brigades relating to Eric and Eileen Blair and their involvement in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Richard Lance Keeble contributes an essay looking at Orwell’s smoking addiction and the ways in which he represents cigarettes in his reportage and novels – and in the celebrated 1946 Tribune essay ‘Books v. Cigarettes’.

Tim Crook brings all his knowledge and experience of law courts and tribunals to bear in his strikingly original essay ‘Orwell’s enduring significance in courts of law’. He investigates how and why Orwellian literary metaphors and views are referred to in legal disputes in the British and European courts. And he argues that Orwell’s influence is based on his strong moral and political views on human liberty, justice and fairness.

John Newsinger contributes an essay on what he describes as ‘the worrying embrace’ of Nineteen Eighty-Four by Mark Dice, an American right-wing, Christian libertarian. Next John Rodden, the world’s leading authority on Orwell’s posthumous reputation, explores the parallels between Orwell and Dickens, including how they conducted their secret love lives. In another article for this issue, John Rodden, with his colleague John Rossi, takes the 75th anniversary of the publication in the US of Orwell’s Animal Farm and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited to consider the lives and writings of the two men.

Professor of Ethics Peter Brian Barry notes that Winston Smith, the anti-hero of Nineteen Eighty-Four, recalls a fallacy that promises to refute the argument of his torturer, O’Brien, although he cannot recall its name. Here, Barry contends that Orwell learned of the unnamed fallacy from the philosopher Bertrand Russell. And Richard Lance Keeble analyses and deconstructs for the first time many of the fascinating and important documents relating to Orwell buried in the Malcolm Muggeridge archive in an American college.

• George Orwell Studies, which is completely independent of The Orwell Society, is jointly edited by Richard Lance Keeble and Tim Crook. For details of purchase and subscriptions see http://www.abramis.co.uk/george-orwell-studies/subs.htm.

*